Hara Takashi

Hara Takashi (1906)

Hara Takashi ( Japanese 原 敬 Hara Takashi , also Hara Kei; * March 15, 1856 ^greg. / 安 政 3 年 2 月 9 日^Japanese in the fief of Morioka ; † November 4, 1921 in Tokyo city ) was a Japanese politician and dated September 29, 1918 the 19th Prime Minister of Japan until his assassination in 1921 . He became known as the first "bourgeois" (i.e. not noble) prime minister in Japanese history and prime minister of the first pure party cabinet. His cabinet was one of the so-called Kulminationsphasen Taisho democratic ( Taisho period ), with reference to the by Yoshihito , the Taisho- tennō , named period ( 1912 - 26 ).

youth

Hara came from a samurai family of the fiefdom ( -han ) Morioka , the later prefecture ( -ken ) Morioka , today's Iwate. His family, like the entire fiefdom ruled by the Nanbu as part of the Northern Alliance in the Boshin War , opposed the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and advocated a continuation of the Tokugawa shogunate of the Tokugawa clan. Hara therefore long remained an outsider in politics, which was dominated by the clans of Chōshū and Satsuma .

At 15, Hara left his home and went to Tokyo. He failed the entrance exam to the Imperial Naval Academy and instead began studying at a French mission school. He was then accepted into the Ministry of Justice's law school, but left in protest after student unrest.

At 17 Hara became a Christian, at 19 he gave up his samurai status ( 士族 , shizoku ) and from then on belonged to the social class of "citizens" ( 平民 , heimin ). Throughout his life he refused to accept titles of nobility, insisted on belonging to the bourgeois class and later pursued a political career in the House of Representatives , the elected, bourgeois lower house of the Reichstag established in 1890 .

Hara as a bureaucrat

After a brief interlude as a journalist, Hara accepted a position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1882, under the protection of Inoue Kaoru , then Foreign Minister. Shortly thereafter, Hara was appointed consul general in the Chinese city of Tientsin ( Tianjin ), under Mutsu Munemitsu (1844-1897); Hara was promoted to deputy foreign minister and later Japanese envoy to Korea. After a few years, Hara left the Foreign Ministry and became a newspaper manager.

Party politician

In 1900 Hara joined the Rikken Seiyūkai party founded by Itō Hirobumi , which was to become the dominant political force in Japan in the following decades. Hara soon became the party's general secretary.

In the election on August 10, 1902 , Hara was elected to the lower house by Iwate in what was then the constituency of Morioka and from 1906 to 1913 he held several cabinets (from January 1906: Saionji cabinet ; from July 1908: Katsura I cabinet ; from August 1911: cabinet Saionji II ; from December 1912: Katsura III cabinet ; February 1913 to March 1914: Yamamoto I cabinet ) the influential post of interior minister . As such, he consolidated the party's power in the prefectures and significantly strengthened the political influence of the Rikken Seiyukai .

In 1914 Hara was elected President of the Rikken Seiyukai and succeeded the multiple prime minister Saionji Kimmochi . Under Hara's leadership, the Rikken Seiyukai became the strongest force in the House of Commons in 1917, but lagged behind an absolute majority.

prime minister

Hara Takashi as Prime Minister

When in 1918 Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake , an army general and pupil of the Genrō Yamagata Aritomo , the "kingmaker" behind the scenes until his death in 1921, had to resign due to the rice riots , Hara's hour came. Hara had been seeking Yamagata's support for years, and the Genrō now saw no alternative to Hara either. Hara was therefore appointed Prime Minister by the Tennō on the advice of Yamagata and formed his cabinet on September 28, 1918, which - apart from the Army Minister and the Navy Minister - consisted exclusively of party politicians. His cabinet was therefore the first purely party cabinet in Japanese history. Hara was the first MP to serve as prime minister.

After taking power, Hara rapidly lost its popularity, u. a. because he resisted the introduction of universal suffrage (for men) and defended census suffrage. During his tenure, Japan took part in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and became a founding member of the League of Nations . When it came to foreign policy, Hara was only able to solve a few problems. B. the question of the Japanese engagement in Siberia ( Siberian intervention ); the question of anti-Japanese riots in China ( May 4th Movement , 1919) and revolts against Japanese colonial rule in Korea ( March 1st Movement , 1919).

In 1921, Hara was stabbed to death by a switchman in Tokyo station .

The most important legacy of Hara is his diary (, Als Hara nikki ), to this day the most important source for historians who deal with the history of the Taishō period.

literature

• Najita, Tetsuo: Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise 1905-1915. Harvard Univ. Press, 1967.
• Olson, LA: Hara Kei - A Political Biography. Ph.D.diss. Harvard University, 1954.
• Duus, Peter: Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taisho Japan. Cambridge / Mass .: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Web links

Commons : Hara Takashi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Hara Kei Memorial Hall
• Newspaper article about Hara Takashi in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Footnotes

1. ↑ www.ndl.go.jp (English)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Hara is the family name, Takashi the first name.